About 90 persons die every year in Sweden as a result of residential fires. The decrease has been very limited over the last two decades despite safety measures as smoke detectors and the more recent regulations on self-extinguishing cigarettes. In order to decrease the number of fatalities it is important to find characteristics of residential fires that results in fatalities. A comparison between the characteristics of residential fires and fatal residential fires is therefore made in this work where mainly publicly available statistics is used. Further characteristics are found by the use of some additional data made accessible to the research project from the Swedish Civil Contingency Agency.The data shows that fatal residential fires are often large when the rescue service arrive involving several rooms, there is usually only one person in the fire compartment when the rescue service arrive, the fire occurs in the night/early morning and it starts often in a sofa or bed and is in many cases caused by smoking.